The most compelling hypothesis I've heard for why Iran is bombing GC neighbors is in an attempt to pop the AI bubble. I obviously don't know if that's true, but that would be extremely clever and this article shows how effective it could be.
Yes, he's informational but a bit conspiratorial. These people are valid points of interest - it's worth entertaining facts and perspectives that are not well highlighted in the media. Even though they are usually kind of wrong.
The truth is nobody is really fully in charge, there are competing interests everywhere, Trump is making the decisions but even he changes his mind very frequently and objectives are not clear.
It's really hard to understand intentions when decisions have to be made in a reactive manner as well.
Rubio indicated 'we had to attack, because Israel was going to go first, and we were going to lose the element of surprise'. While that is an absurd and crazy reason to 'go to war' - it's actually a very rational tactic for 'when to start' as 'first mover advantage' is enormous in conflict. You can see how 'the most powerful entity on earth' is moved by events beyond it's control.
It's almost better to describe these situations in terms of all of the factions capabilities, influence, power, motivations than it is to say 'this is why it's happening'.
Once conflicts start, they have a way of perpetuating themselves in a 'circularly reactive' way, it fuels itself as both sides have difficulty standing down.
This guy is a well known conspiracy theorist. He's a high school teacher, not a university professor as "Professor Jiang" indicates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Xueqin
But is it true his video "The Iran Trap" predicted the current war with Iran? Seems like a smart guy, regardless of whether he's a high school teacher or not.
The gulf states are US allies that can much more easily be hit + cause damage.
They are Iran's regional enemies, that the US is effectively defending them from.
Spooking the their leaders + population puts a huge amount of pressure on Trump.
Iran has been successful in hitting Patriot and THAAD radars, those are massively expensive, years to replace.
If those go down, then Iran can 'terrorize' the region at will including keeping Hormuz closed.
Most of the Oil goes to China + India, and China is a supporter of Iran, so funny enough, they may be the one's to lean on Iran to open up.
At the same time China does not want to see Iran fall Venezuela style - it would put the US foot on the neck of China as they import most of their fuel.
Nobody is talking about the 'China' angle, but they have been preparing for war in Taiwan, and securing energy access with Iran - even hosting peace talks between Gulf states and Iran (huge move, USA not present) is key to that.
This is absolutely part of the 'Great Game' strategy, to take Iran Oil + relationship off the table for China. Not likely to happen.
The AI bubble is probably not a primary objective.
Probably not, they are preparing but that does not mean they will ever do it.
Xi just faced a mutiny and had to put top generals away.
Key people in China military oppose the plans.
Even as they near readiness with some things, others remain far behind, and untested.
It's an extremely risky move and they don't take those kinds of risks.
Island landing 100 km away = Chinese D-Day means absolutely enormous casualties, and no guarantees of success.
If they lose that fight, CPP will be overthrown, that sounds dramatic, but those are the stakes at that level esp. with casualties.
The #1 objective is to infiltrate and take it without a fight, and/or cause pain and get citiznes to take the 'easy pill' and Taiwan slowly comes into China fold without ever any incident at all.
Barring that a blockade would be the thing, and then only usa could even hope to run it, it would be a sight to see, and very hard for us to do as China has long range weapons now and many things specifically designed to keep USN away from 1st island chain, means they can strangle Taiwan into submission with no invasion.
But if that happens, USN closes gulf and Malaca straigths, probably goes into S. China Sea. Very bad. China needs food and fuel to import.
It's very complex and China is not a monolith, many actors, it's authoritarian yet citizens are not dummies, they protest all the time we just don't hear about it.
Probably the chances are most acute 2029-early 2030s. This is from former Australian PM Kevin Rudd how is Western World's #1 non-Chinese China expert.
Xi is playing against bad headwinds though and the direct opportunity may not resent itself.
If they 'thought like us' and were a bit more decisive and risky, yes, 'now' would be a grand time to do it, wouldn't it? But no.
This is the first time I've seen anyone looking for a reason! Isn't the reason manifestly obvious? They're bombing their enemies. The ones that lobbied Trump to attack Iran, and that host US defense assets.
Thanks! Israel is obviously no surprise. I hadn't seen anything of the Saudis pushing for the attack so that's new to me, though that's only one of the GCC countries.
> The most compelling hypothesis I've heard for why Iran is bombing GC neighbors is in an attempt to pop the AI bubble
Huh?!? ADIA, Mubadala, and the PIF are significant players but not that significant.
The Gulf States and Iran have had bad blood for generations.
There's a reason why car bombings in Al Ahvaz and Sistan-ve-Balochistan were and are respectively a constant occurrence - Khuzestani Arabs and especially Baloch from Makran are overrepresented in defense and policy roles in Gulf states like Kuwait, Qatar, UAE (especially Abu Dhabi), and Oman.
And Iran and the Gulf States (and before that the British Empire) constantly fought each other over delineating the Arabian/Persian Gulf. It was a major reason the Gulf turned to the US when facing both Iraq and Iran in the 1970s-80s.
What makes you think JM conspiracy pilled? And how would you propose one tries to understand Iran's current motivations with regards to attacking gulf neighbors?
I explicitly didn't say the idea of them attempting to preempt an AI bubble pop is the reason. I explicitly said I don't know if its true.
Yes, there is a long history of bad blood between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Yes the region is a powderkeg. No, trying to understand the motivations today isn't immediately a conspiracy theory.
> I explicitly didn't say the idea of them attempting to preempt an AI bubble pop is the reason. I explicitly said I don't know if its true
Ah.
Well in that case, the answer is "no, AI is not the reason".
> how would you propose one tries to understand Iran's current motivations with regards to attacking gulf neighbors
1. The Gulf States host Western (not just American) bases so from a tactical perspective it would be dumb not to strike Gulf States.
2. The Gulf States and the Islamic Republic have had decades of bad blood, from the Syrian, Libyan, Yemeni, and Sudanese Civil War to inciting a Shia insurgency in Eastern Saudi and Bahrain to the repression of Sunnis in Iran to disputes over NatGas extraction to attempts by the Iranian government to overthrow Gulf governments.
3. The Gulf States backed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War which lasted from 1980 to 1988 and a war which all of Iran's leadership are veterans of. Iran openly fielded child soldiers towards the end of the war, many of whom ended up becoming leadership - while most HNers (who based on references I've seen seem to have been more in the late 70s/early 80s) were playing NESes or watching Hanna Barbera reruns, a large number of your age cohort in Iran were choking on Sarin Gas or sent in human waves against the Iraqi Army, and those survivors are who are the older members and leaders of the IRGC, Basij, and Iran today.
4. The KSA lobbied to strike Iran [2] along with Israel.
A Gulf-Iran War was a question of "when" not "if". Plenty of Gulf nationals fought against IRGC trained or actual personnel in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and the animosity against Iran and Iranian proxies is deep in the Gulf. Similarly, the animosity against Arabs and Sunni Arab States is deep as well.
Heck, this is how Iran and Iranian proxies are depicted in young adult cartoons in Saudi Arabia [0][1] - as terrorists and a depressive death cult obsessed with martyrdom, Ali, and Huseyn.
Realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling. The billionaires doing well masks everyone else struggling to afford groceries.
In general, people are kind of calling BS on what the definition should be because we are all collectively feeling that things are doing poorly but no one is quite willing to recognize it due to the definitional stuff.
What did your response have to do with your quote?
We can have the most growth ever as a civilization and still have the common person lose out.
The Industrial Revolution also famously had a lot of people pushed into impoverished situations while robber barons or the highland clearing lords won out, despite the GDP of those respective countries increasing.
> What did your response have to do with your quote?
The notion that growth can be unequal is not something that has changed. The anomaly was the post-WWII eventide regime.
That doesn't mean there is anything natural about unequal growth. But if we want to return to that previous mode, we have to first understand what it was. And what it was was anomalous.
> Why do you think I responded to you the way I did?
How is the rhethorical-question style working out?
I'm pointing out an ahistorical claim in the top post. You want to broaden the discussion without acknowledging that, and without actually saying anything, which isn't particularly interesting to engage on.
You didn’t point out an ahistorical claim. They didn’t claim that GDP wasn’t growing. They said that it wasn’t helping the common man and you jumped in with an equivalent of “but the DOW is over 50k”
> They didn’t claim that GDP wasn’t growing. They said that it wasn’t helping the common man and you jumped in with an equivalent of “but the DOW is over 50k”
No, this is a ridiculous misreading. They said that "realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling" is "what changed." That is ahistorical. I may realize, today, that the sky is blue, but that's a personal discovery, not a general one. GDP growth amidst widespread poverty has been the default in most of human history; it isn't what changed.
Whether or not GDP is growing was never brought up by anyone except you.
The connection is that GDP/Recession has never been about mainstreet or average joe.
Recession is usually bad for Joe and mainstreat, but the opposite is not implied. It is ignorant to think it is or was defined by the average experience.
I feel it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience. Our metrics have been misleading or we just need better ones and/or possibly a new word for how average joe talks about “recession”. A purely academic definition that has no basis in reality seems pointless to me.
> it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience
If defined rigorously, sure. But the literature is replete with measureas of downturns.
What more commonly comes up in online discussions is some dude with a vibe, which isn't particularly useful for talking about anything larger in scale than that one dude.
purely academic definistions have a tremendous number of purposes.
Just as it would be silly to define a countries military equipment production capacity by public sentiment, the same is true for purely financial GDP.
There are tons of metrics that can used to articulate how the economy feels for average joe. We have low consumer sentiment, lagging median income, GINI, opinion surveys, ect.
Using the word "recession" adds gravitas by claiming something that isnt true.
Even during the Industrial Revolution as well. And even the idealized vision of the 1950s-60s that is common on the Internet was itself a fantasy for a plurality of Americans until the Great Deal began sinking in.
There was a period of slightly more income equality in the 1930s-1960s as Piketty [0] and Zucman [1] show, but this was also at the expense of racial and gender equality.
The 1970s was probably the most equal period economically speaking as Zucman showed [1].
We should not strive to return to the 1950s - we should strive to be better than anytime previously.
I think that’s what’s changed though, as GP asked, people want to define recession as closer to the social wellbeing than a metric like gdp that is divorced
Doesn’t this kinda create a problem though? Like a recession implies economic slowdown, but social wellbeing can decrease while the economy is fine.
For example, a plague or severe weather might make the average person have a worse standard of living, but if the economy isn’t net affected, it seems wrong to say we are in a recession.
Our vocabulary is too limited then. I know average people only use the word recession when things are compounding negative towards their personal finances / economics AND they feel like most people they know are dealing with the same. They don't claim it's a Katrina/Harvey/[any storm name] recession, they know the differences and that storm driven struggles are usually localized / temporary with a known amount of work to rebuild - average joe feels helpless in a macro-recession as it's only going to be solved in time and/or with help of politicians they don't trust.
Plagues are a weird example, because I can't think of any situation where a plague would not affect the economy - and it should effect it negatively. I think COVID effected it negatively, we just chose to have a financial long COVID and drag out what should have been a financial disaster without all the government programs. Instead of economic collapse and starvation, we chose to massively spend money knowing it would be paid in time through inflation and also knowing it wouldn't get reallocated in an even way as pre-COVID. (That's my take, I don't know if there's any validity to it but it's just my gut feeling.)
Historically, both politicians and yhe media considered two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The Biden administration changed that, basically arguing that the definition is too narrow and they preferred to use a more broad set of indicators that just so happened to avoid calling a recession when they wanted to claim a strong economy.
The Biden administration argued for a change. They did not convince others. It's like saying "Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico" - no one but loyalists bought in.
Economists continue to use the same definition as before, despite your attempt to blame Biden.
It wasn’t “revoked under Biden.” That implies the Biden administration (or any administration) gets to define this. They don’t. Recessions in the United States are generally demarcated by NBER.¹
>It does imply that because the Trump admin killed the group involved with preventing pandemics[1]
No it doesn't, not without massively reading in between the lines. This is getting to absurd levels of nitpicking over wording, like "autistic people" vs "people with autism".
>I assume you are being disingenuous by using that claim while also trying to smear the Biden admin.
Two can play at this game. I assume you're being disingenuous by trying to put words in my mouth over tiny disagreements in wording.
That was never such a "rule"; that was 1 of 4 considerations from a 1974 NY Times opinion piece, and those 4 considerations were in turn a simplification of the overall recession considerations, as the combined 4 items were intended to be more understandable by the general public than the actual items.
Where had you heard that there was such a "rule"?
(And as others pointed out, it's a private organization, not the government, that has set and evaluates recession criteria.)
No, but it does matter how much money the alleged infringer has.
Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.
Yes, the VC-backed startup ecosystem that was the origin of this website does rely on propagating the myth that we live in a meritocracy to ensure it has enough cheap labor to build prototypes that its anointed few can acquire at rock bottom pricing. But we've been through enough cycles of it now that we've started seeing the patterns.
History clearly establishes that the open market assigns substantial value to human life. We just happen to have outlawed trading in it. Human life has been deemed worthless by force of law.
Less facetiously, you're committing a semantic error.
"Markets clear" is one of those meritocracy myths that we the hoi paloi get taught explicitly all the while the elite will tell you to your face they don't believe. Google and Meta are massively profitable companies built on the idea that the concept of value is manipulable.
You're thinking post-scarcity. We aren't there yet, but one say well have a magic wand, magic shovel, and magic anything else that is currently scarce.
Sorry, I don't follow how a sarcastic joke about the claims of post-scarcity would make me a ludite or imply that I am saying models today aren't useful for certain tasks.
In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.
China has continued to rapidly increase their use of coal for power generation. Just a few days ago there was an article about them hitting an 18-year high of new coal power installations [1]
It is deceptive to compare coal % of power generation, because China specifically substitutes coal for gas because they have none of that (and no reliable source). This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability. So for China you have 55% coal and 3% gas while the US uses 16% coal and 40% gas for electrical power.
If you compare numbers, you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity (3000kWh/person * 0.5kgCo2/kWh for China vs 5500kWh/person * 0.35kgCo2/kWh, i.e. 1.5 vs 1.9 tons of Co2/year/person from electricity for China vs the US).
> It is deceptive to compare coal % of power generation
It isn't, because coal emits significantly more CO2 per unit electricity than natural gas, since it's pure carbon instead of a hydrocarbon, and therefore should be getting discontinued by everyone rather than installed by anyone.
The "it's a developing country" arguments seem like a dodge when the real reason is that they'd rather emit 80% more CO2 so they can burn coal instead of buying oil or building enough nuclear and renewables to not do either one.
> This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability.
Those percentages are for power actually generated and already take into account capacity factor.
> you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity
What excuse is that for burning coal? Should Germany and the UK be justified in burning more coal too, since they have lower electricity consumption per capita than China?
My point isnt that gas is just as bad as coal. My point is that coal (in China) fills the same role that gas has for electricity in other countries.
Saying "China is >50% coal while the US is only 15%" misses half the picture, because the combined gas + coal percentage is actually almost the same, and the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).
Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.
In my view, you only have a solid position to throw shade at China if your countries economical position is somewhat comparable (i.e. not rich as fuck) and you did manage to "resist" the temptation of big fossil reserves.
You could make an argument that Spain was a bit of a poster child in this regard in the 1990s, but even in that comparison they were much wealthier (both absolutely and comparatively to China now).
I could turn the argument around, and ask "why is the US still using >50% fossil fuels in its energy mix, despite being super rich"? What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power. If the more-than-twice-as-rich US can not resist the temptation of gas power, why would you expect much poorer China to resist the twice-as-bad coal?
> Saying "China is >50% coal while the US is only 15%" misses half the picture, because the combined gas + coal percentage is actually almost the same,
Except that coal emits almost twice as much CO2 as natural gas per unit of heat generated, and on top of that the majority of US natural gas plants are combined cycle (which converts more of the heat into electricity), because combined cycle is easy for gaseous fuels, whereas neither China nor anyone else is doing combined cycle for coal at scale because it requires turning the solid coal into a gas first.
> the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).
Oil and gas are an international commodity. It's not even like anyone has a monopoly on it -- if you don't like the US, buy it from Russia. If you don't like Russia, buy it from countries in the middle east.
On top of that, it's assuming that a modern grid even needs to be 60% fossil fuels. Meanwhile several other countries are demonstrating that it isn't at all necessary.
> Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.
It's not physically possible to build large-scale hydro power in a place like Iraq or Singapore. China can't import a river from Norway. They could very easily import natural gas from any number of countries -- as many other countries do.
> What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power.
Except that isn't the real answer. The real answer is that the US has a major oil industry lobbying to sustain its existence. Which is a bad reason, but nobody has figured out a great way to overcome it yet. However, that doesn't apply when you're only first building the infrastructure in the first place, because then you don't have incumbents trying to sustain a status quo that isn't yet established -- and then why would you pick the most terrible one to entrench?
While power consumption per capita is sometimes useful, I don't think it fits here. They continue to invest heavily in coal, that isn't leading in green energy.
New coal power installations != increased use of coal for power generation. You have to stop this lie by omission.
Their new coal plants either replace older ones. Or they are left idle. Close to 90% of all their generation growth comes from solar and wind.
They use coal because they have coal. Just like the US uses natural gas and then pats itself on the back for "reducing emissions" by switching from coal to gas. But their current trajectory will see them going to burning very little coal. It's a national security issue for them.
They have also increased total coal use as well. I don't have the stats handy which is why I didn't include an unsourced link, but I will add that here if I have time to find a solid source for that before this thread goes stale.
I'd guess that this is in large part due to the sheer amount of datacenters they plan to bring online in the coming years and the fact that they can't scale up green energy quickly enough to meet the expected demand.
In an ideal world I think they'd prefer to be powered by 100% clean energy but not at the cost of losing the AI race.
Electric cars aren't a magic bullet. We need to drive less, not scrap ICE vehicles and buy new electric vehicles made on the other side of the planet with globally sourced materials and shipped to the US.
With a correspondingly smaller decrease in CO2 output. We're in a Climate Catastrophe on the edge of Global Tipping Points, remember!
Sarcasm aside, I think this is why people have generally stopped caring as much. What we are being asked to do (buy new shiny things for some estimated small percentage decrease in lifecycle CO2 output) does not match the messaging.
A lot of Americans probably won't be able to commute on a bicycle, but could easily use one for shorter trips like visiting friends, doing groceries, getting a burger, etc.
Even with commutes, there are lots that could be done on a bicycle. I briefly lived in the US and had a 6-mile (~10 km) commute. It was an unpleasant experience because there was exactly zero cycling infrastructure along the way, but otherwise it was a brief 25-minute trip, shorter than any of the commutes I've had in Europe. Not a single one of my American colleagues, all of whom lived locally, cycled or took a bus.
The issue is not just commute distances, it is cultural. Just in my personal "click" there are 5 people of which:
- 2 live less than 5 minutes from a metro that literally takes them to the office, they never take the metro
- 2 live easily within a biking distance to work, 1 has a bike, another has e-bike, they never bike to work
- 1 lives literally walking distance to work, she never walks to work
Public transportation where I live is vast, you can easily commute with the public transportation to just about everywhere but only low(er) income people will take public transportation.
Two most-frequently cited reasons I hear why not bike/walk/...
1. Dangerous - every female friend I have lists this as #1 reason they always drive. Regardless of the fact that I live in the area where I often forget to close my garage overnight and leave the front door open (very very low crime rates) the women feel unsafe. A lot of sensationalism in the news regarding every minor thing happening might be to blame but I have a wife and a daughter and am godfather to several girls so I understand
2. Inconvenient - what if after work I want to go to ____ and ____ and ____. Now I got to track back home and then perhaps change clothes, clean the house... and then get into the car to go to _____.
Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?
Bikes are awesome. I do 95% of my trips by bike. It's healthy, cheap, and has very low amortized emissions. Everybody can repair a bike with a small amount of training.
More countries/cities have to do bike-centric road design.
Is it really? Electric vehicles require a lot of resources to produce, and those resources are produced globally and shipped overseas multiple times. The batteries are only expected to hold up for 7-10 years, ask my 2014 Volt how the hybrid battery pack is doing.
I get that a change in lifestyle is more difficult for the individual than a change in what we are buying. My point, though, was that only the former is going to have a much greater impact.
If there was some investment most of us could switch to public transit. The problems people have with transit are mostly around there isn't enough of it to be useful - when /where it is useful people use it.
That's not the full story, you're right that they "could switch", but would they actually?
Good, working and efficient public transit still means having significantly less comfort compared to having your private vehicle. Pretty much the only exception is using the metro in a congested downtown area at peak traffic (still, your metro experience will also be degraded by the peak traffic), or perhaps if parking your vehicle will be very difficult. And i say this as someone in a rather big city in Europe who is currently only using public transit. And there is a lot of stuff that i'd like to do but i can't do since i currently don't have access to a car or motorbike.
People don't just want "useful", at least the majority of people in developed countries also want "comfortable", and "nice", and "easy", and "enjoyable". A peak-hour metro ride or missing your tram by one minute is none of that.
I would settle for "available". Where I live, i have a 40 minute commute to work by car. I live in a suburb of a midsize american city.
When i bought my house, i looked into public transportation options. Instead of a 40 minute car ride, i could drive for 5 minutes and then take 3 hours (and 2 bus transfers) to get to my office by bus.
I would love to get some reading done on my commute, and would be willing to spend an hour on a bus or train instead of 40 minutes fighting traffic in my car, but it's just not really feasable. I think this situation is extremely common.
If the next bus/tram isn't almost there when you miss the previous then it isn't nearly as useful.
there are things you can't do with transit. However nearly everyone is living in a family - so keep the truck to tow the boat, but get rid of the other cars that you won't need if transit is good. That is a much more reasonably goal that transit can aim for. A few like you won't own a car/truck at all, but most won't need to go that far
What you're describing with Google Search already exists, search engines already offer their own search settings including "safe search" or whatever they call it which filters out adult images.
Services can absolutely decide to provide their own content settings. It doesn't require a universal setting or OS requirements, and it doesn't require providing PII to every website or telling a central authority every site you visit.
You're missing the huge step that the government asking for "all legal uses" terminology is also who decides what is legal. Congress isn't willing to act as a check on executive power, meaning the contract they demanded simply says "I do what I want."
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